DH

Completed Published Co-authors 2013 Literary and Linguistic Computing. 28(4), 615-628. Luciano Frizzera, Geoff Roeder, Ernesto Peña, Teresa Dobson, Stan Ruecker, Geoffrey Rockwell, Susan Brown, & the INKE Research Group In this paper, we provide a discussion of the concept of visual interactive workflows, how they relate to our previous work on structured surfaces, and how they have been adapted to experiments in managing articles for journal publication and managing biographical histories being written and tagged in XML. We conclude with a user experience study of the prototypes, which suggests that they are relatively acceptable at the level of reflective response, but might benefit from moreRead More →

A Case for Considering the Many Dimensions of Gender in DH Teaching and Research There are genders beyond masculinity and femininity. Genderqueers, bois, gurls and otherwise gender variant people explore and express a wide variety of non-binary gender identities. Joy Johnson and Robin Repta note that “gender is typically theorized as a multidimensional, context-specific factor that changes according to time and place”, but in research practice, gender “is routinely assumed to be a homogeneous category … measured by a single check box” (28). The non-binary gender communities are untapped, underserved, and underrepresented by most scholarly activities. Digital humanities scholars have the potential to move beyondRead More →

Visual Design for Digital Humanists a Course at the 2013 Digital Humanities Summer Institute (June 6 – 10, Victoria, BC) This offering provides an introduction to the theory and practical application of the fundamentals of visual communication design, in the context of digital humanities projects. Emphasis will be placed on conceptualization, iteration, principles and elements of design, grid-based layouts, and typography. Instruction will be a combination of lecture format, demonstration, in-class critiques, hands-on exercises, and a project component derived from student materials. Participants are asked to bring their own computers with Illustrator, Photoshop, and/or InDesign (as well as basic knowledge of the software), plus atRead More →

Late Nights at the Scriptorium: Interim Results from the Interface Cell of the MONK Project Stéfan Sinclair, Andrew Macdonald, Matthew Bouchard, Mike Plouffe, Alejandro Giacometti, Amit Kumar, Milena Radzikowska, Stan Ruecker, Piotr Michura, Carlos Fiorentino, Matthew Kirschenbaum, and Catherine Plaisant The Metadata Offer New Knowledge (MONK) Project is an attempt to leverage emerging text mining, text analysis, and text visualization technologies for use by humanities scholars. Led by PIs John Unsworth and Martin Mueller, the MONK team consists of over 35 researchers at 7 universities in the United States and Canada. The project is organized around five core research areas, or cells, dedicated respectively to data, analytics, users and use cases, collaboration, andRead More →

Over the past ten years, I’ve had the privilege to collaborate on over a dozen academic and industry-partnered interface innovation projects, including several with budgets of over a million dollars. Some of our team members are working with other researchers for the first time, and many of them have not worked previously with researchers from other disciplines. Over the years, and based on our experiences in collaboration, we have developed a project charter for helping to manage expectations of the various members of interdisciplinary research teams. The charter is based on the need to explicitly discuss principles and policies of research practice with people from different disciplines at the start of theRead More →

Coming from comparatively different cultures, interface designers and computer programmers often benefit from working together, but in the context of experimental interface design, as opposed to the implementation of current best practices, the interaction requires some strategic negotiation. There are several factors involved. First, the academic culture of computer programmers has developed in such a way that there is a chronic fear of “vaporware,” or software tools that are discussed before they actually exist. This healthy caution has the unfortunate consequence, however, that computer scientists cannot receive direct academic recognition for design work, but need to produce working prototypes as quickly as possible. Second, GUI technologiesRead More →

The purpose of this session, presented at the 2007 Society for Digital Humanities Conference, was to discuss a set of research projects that deal with visualizing features of individual documents. These projects have been proceeding in association with the Metadata Opens New Knowledge (MONK) project. MONK is an attempt to build on the earlier NORA and Wordhoard projects in their efforts to make data-mining and visualization systems available in forms that are congenial to humanities scholars, and that work across a wide range of digital collections. The visualization component includes both scientific visualizations, where numeric data about the collections is presented in visual forms, andRead More →

The goal of the NORA project is to produce software for discovering, visualizing, and exploring significant patterns across large collections of full-text humanities resources in existing digital libraries. The Clear Browser (shown above) provides a number of blank kernels that can be configured by the user through a data mining “training” process, then be applied to the larger collection. This sketch shows a total collection of 5000 author names, with a subset selected by the kernel. Team: University of Alberta University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign University of Maryland Mount Royal University CaSTA 2006: Breadth of Text – A Joint Computer Science and Humanities Computing Conference. UniversityRead More →

The goal of this article is to identify and describe one of the primary functions of aesthetic quality in the design of computer interfaces and visualization tools. We suggest that researchers in library and information science, computing science, and humanities computing can derive advantages in visual research by acknowledging – through their efforts to advance aesthetic quality – that a significant function of aesthetics in this context is to inspire the user’s confidence. This confidence typically serves to create a sense of trust in the interface or tool, and to increase its perceived usability. In turn, this increased trust may result in an increased willingness to engage with the interface, on the basisRead More →

I live and work

on the ancestral and traditional Indigenous territories of the Blackfoot and the people of the Treaty 7 region in Southern Alberta, which includes the Siksika, the Piikani, the Kainai, the Tsuu T’ina and the Stoney Nakoda First Nations. The City of Calgary is also home to the Metis Nation of Alberta, Region III.